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Sisi & Eugénie: the empresses who redefined royalty
00:45:58
Nancy Goldstone discusses the lives of the empresses of France and Austria and reveals how their experiences redefined the role of royal women in the 19th century
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Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. In the latter half of the 19th century, Europe was dazzled by the beauty, charm and sensibility of two empresses. Eugenie, Empress of the French, via her marriage to Napoleon iii, and Elizabeth, better known as Sisi, consort to the Austrian Emperor Franz Josef. In this episode, author Nancy Goldstone speaks to Danny Bird about the lives of these two women, how they broke boundaries and redefined what a royal consort could be.
- [02:12]
Nancy Goldstone
Nancy, you've written about some incredible historical women before, but what was it about Empress Elizabeth of Austria, AKA Sisi, and Empress Eugenie of France, that made you want to tell their stories in tandem?
- [02:23]
Narrator
Well, I remember distinctly when I first came across Sissy. Empress Elizabeth. She's more commonly known as Sissy. It was at least five years ago and I was researching a much earlier book about Elizabeth Stuart, actually the Winter Queen. We were in Prague and we just finished touring the castle. We walked outside to some of the shops and there was a bookstore. It was a I love going into bookstores in other countries. So of course we went in and there there was a little English section with I. It was almost Like a child's book with a picture on it that was standing out on the shelf of a woman in a good fairy princess gown with diamond stars in her hair. And I literally did a double take and said, who is that? I didn't think for a moment that she was a real person. I thought this was like a German fairytale or something. And I bought the book, and it turns out that she was an empress and right up my alley. And I said, well, okay, I have to do her. I don't care. Her story must be wonderful. But then, as I really understood who she was and that it was the 19th century, I always try to find. I don't just do one person because I've discovered in the course of doing all of my books that you have to set some kind of context for that person's life. You either have to follow it out to the next generation or find some other way to do it. And obviously, Austria and France were on different sides, opposite sides of the 19th century. And I said, well, maybe there's somebody in France I could do. And immediately I started looking. Empress Eugenie. She just really popped out. I had never heard of her, and I didn't realize how wonderful the French Second Empire was. So right away, those two glamour girls, I said, okay, this is going to be the best way to do this.
- [04:09]
Nancy Goldstone
Brilliant. And can you tell me a little bit about their respective backgrounds? What were their childhoods like?
- [04:14]
Narrator
Sissy was born on Christmas Eve, 1837, in Munich. And Munich was the capital then of the Kingdom of Bavaria. In the time when Sisi was growing up, it was actually quite a progressive place. It had a king, it's true, but it also had a constitution. It had freedom of religion. Even Jews had citizen rights, and Protestants could marry Catholics. There was freedom of the press. They even had an elected assembly. They put some restrictions on the king, and it all worked fine. She herself, her family was even kind of more progressive because her family father, who was a very outsized character and influenced her very much when she was growing up. He kind of was a Bavarian comic opera character. He dabbled in the arts. He wrote articles for the paper. He composed zither music. He invites his friends over, and they have King Arthur nights, where they all dress up as Knights of the Round Table and drink beer and sing songs late into the night. And he instilled in her a love of the arts and also specifically of the poetry of a very famous poet at the time, a German Jewish poet called Heinrich Heine, who was, I realize now, he was Basically the Bob Dylan of his day. He was a rebel celebrity poet and songwriter. And Sissi, for the rest of her life, she would always admire and just keep Heine's words with her. And I have to say, one of the best parts of the book for me was that even though Heine dies early into her reign, his poetry predicts her entire life. So before every single chapter, I had the pleasure of going through his poems and finding the one couple of verses that absolutely described what she was going through. So she was never supposed to be an empress. Her older sister was supposed to be empress. She was a great athlete. She just ran around. She kept pens full of rabbits. She was a wild child, basically. And so Eugenie has a very different background. She isactually, she was Spanish. She was born on May 5, 1826, in the town of Granada, that's a town in southern Spain where they have the magnificent Alhambra Palace. Her father was a member of one of the oldest and most important families in Spain. In Spain, they call these very old, very wealthy, very politically connected families grandees. So her father's a grandee. Her mother's side a little less impressive. Her mother was the daughter of a penniless Scotsman who emigrates to southern Spain, gets a job as a young man as an apprentice in a wine shop, uses that enterprising age old technique of marrying the boss's daughter and taking over the business to get ahead. So that's where Eugenie, she has this beautiful, beautiful red gold hair that's from the Scottish side. But the family sent Eugenie's mother to Paris to be educated. So her mother is a very cultured person, loves to have the artists and writers around her. So when she marries Eugenie's father, she gets the title, she gets the money. So she becomes like the huge society hostess in Madrid for decades. And of course, this is where Eugenie learns to throw a party. But actually it was her father who really influenced her. Her father was a war hero, an international war hero, and he fought on the side of the first Napoleon. So he instills in her. He idolized Napoleon and he instills in her the same adoration for him. He thought it was government by the hero. So when later, when she meets Napoleon iii, she's kind of already primed to go along with the brand.
- [08:08]
Nancy Goldstone
I thought that was quite interesting, actually, because of course, in Spain, the strug Napoleon is a war for independence. So did that cause them to be pariahs in any sense in that society, you know?
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Narrator
Well, yes, Eugenie's father fought against his own country. But what Napoleon promised him basically was that they would get rid of the old Bourbon monarchy, which was corrupt, which it was corrupt, it was ineffective. The Bourbons had intermarried so much that you didn't always get equality at the end of it. So he was right that that government should go. And so he thought there would be improvements if Napoleon, because Napoleon gave people constitution, protected people's rights. So he was actually trying to improve the Spanish, you know, the economy, modernize it, all the stuff that was supposed to happen. So he was not a pariah. He actually ended up part of the government at the end.
- [09:03]
Nancy Goldstone
Very interesting. Today, Sisi is something of a pop culture icon. There have been countless films about her. If you visit Vienna, you'll find chocolate bar foxes bearing her likeness. And she's the focus of a recent popular NETFLIX drama. But Eugenie hasn't had quite the same afterlife. Why do you think Sisi has been so mythologized and Eugenie has remained fairly obscure?
- [09:23]
Narrator
Well, let's start with why Sissy is so popular. So Sissy is their Princess Diana. She's the high spirited beauty who defies the Imperial family and goes on to totally eclipse them with her celebrity. And there are a lot of similarities to that story. But Eugenie, who was in office for 18 years and helped build France up back into a modern power with her husband, she. Because the empire fell so badly, she and Napoleon III were more reviled afterwards. Although everything about France that we see today, the romantic city, haute couture, the explosion in the arts, just if you look at, even in the way they did, the opening of the Olympics, the opening ceremony of the Olympics, there you can draw a straight line back from that to the second Empire. And that was all Eugenie. So I think she needs to be come back a little now, because even though on foreign policy, it's true, they were terrible domestically, they really did a lot for France at that time.
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Nancy Goldstone
And we should probably talk a little bit about their husbands. But on top of that, why would.
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Narrator
We talk about their husbands?
- [10:38]
Nancy Goldstone
We have to be fair.
- [10:40]
Narrator
Well, the thing about Franz Josef is that he was put in place the person who was the power in Austria. When Sissy first came into the family, there was her husband, Franz Joseph, the Emperor of Austria. And then the third person in the marriage was Archduchess Sophia, Franz Joseph's mother. And she was really the power that got everything started, because Archduchess Sophia organized a coup in 1848 in which she deposed not only her brother in law, the emperor, but also her own husband, who was legally next in line for the throne. She just retires him right out of the way in order to put her very obedient, very malleable son, 18 year old son, Franz Josef, on the throne. And then after that, Archduchess Sophia and her generals declare martial law and then institute an autocratic regime of all over the empire that was so repressive and so frankly vindictive that the Czar of Russia protested. And do you have any idea how brutal you have to be for the Czar of Russia to think you're barbaric? Oh, no. And this is what Sisi has to contend with. And Franz Josef, far from being the romantic hero that they're trying to make him out to be in the Netflix series, he's right in there with his mother. He also believes that if anyone protests against them, they should be repressed immediately. He also believes that his subjects should just shut up and do what they're told. They didn't like any of these. You know, it's the middle of the 19th century, there's all these new ideas coming out there. There's democracy, there's voting, there's rights of workers. Archduchess Sophia and Franz Joseph want none of that. They're going to turn the clocks back two decades. They reinstitute the Inquisition in Austria suddenly in 1850s in Austria, all throughout the regime. There's no freedom of religion. Forget Jews, Protestants were not allowed to worship publicly under her, Protestants couldn't marry Catholics. There's no freedom of the press. You can see what Sissi's walking into here. Although they didn't burn you at the stake, they did institute religious courts of law, where if you did something they didn't like, they hauled you in there, they fined you, they closed your business down, they threw you in jail, they deported you. I mean, this was serious stuff. So Franz Joseph, he's an emperor of the old school. He just wants to keep being what it was. Napoleon III, he was a different story. Eugenie's husband is Napoleon III, Emperor of the French. He takes over in 1852, and although he takes over in a coup, he immediately has an election afterwards where he wins by 7 million votes to like 100,000. And I have to tell you, I checked that election over and over against how many citizens were voting and whether. And it came very quickly. And that was an accurate reflection. That was not something that was made up. That was what they wanted. They wanted to go back to the time of the first Napoleon, they wanted an empire because they had just come off another republic. And the republics had a bad name in France because of the terror. Everybody thought that a republic was just going to go into chaos and they didn't want to have that. They were used to having a king or an emperor and they wanted to go back. So Napoleon III domestically, he has this great vis. You know, it's the middle of the industrial revolution. There's all these great new technological advances going on. There's railroads for the first time, there's the telegraph. It's invented, revolutionizes communications. There's factories. He wants to harness all that technological innovation and modernize France so that France will lead Europe into the future. And especially he wants to make the capital city of Paris the center of Europe. And that is why he lays the railroads and he does the infrastructure and puts in new and widens the boulevards and puts in the parks and suddenly here we have this romantic city. And it worked. And Eugenie was there to fill it, to draw people in, to spread French culture. And she did a fabulous job. She was the style icon of Europe for two decades. Believe me, nobody else could get you. Do you know what her signature was? It was a caged crinoline. It's those big hoop skirts. Everyone wore them, Sissy wore them, Mary Todd Lincoln wore them, Queen Victoria wore them. You had to be beautiful to carry. Only Eugenie could have done that.
- [15:09]
Nancy Goldstone
So, so a trendsetter. Now both women also had intense personal struggles as you've alluded to there. Sissy had a very controlling mother in law and Eugenie was often left dealing with Napoleon III's numerous infidelities. Do you think their personal challenges influenced the way they engaged with court life?
- [15:26]
Narrator
Oh, that's a good. Well, definitely Sissy. Poor Sissy, you know. So Sissy was 15 years old when she was engaged. She was given 24 hours to decide whether to marry somebody that she had met only 24. That and actually her mother said to her, you don't send the emperor packing. There was no question but that she was going to have to say yes. He jilted her 19 year old sister very publicly and it was hilarious. Archduchess Sophia, she's a very practiced politician. She writes this letter to her sister with a spin on it explaining all these things. They make it out into this great romance, but really they're lucky because Frances is 23. Her sister 19 years old would have been age appropriate. 15 is pretty young. He loves her because she's 15. He loves her because she's a child. He wanted it like a doll. And Cissy has no idea what she is walking into. Like I said, her background was much more liberal and you know, it's the 19th century. Unfortunately, she could not consult the social media on her phone and find out what was going on in the world. She did not know even where the Austrian Empire was when she was first engaged. And her mother in law just wants her to be quiet. Obviously she's not going to give up power. By this time, Franz Josef is running the government. He's 23, but he's just doing everything his mother says anyway. So they're in complete alignment on that. And she just wants an empress who's going to sit there and be quiet and have sons, have heirs. And this is not Sisi at all. They took someone with this light and all this freedom and wild child energy and they tried to crush it. And I have to say, it becomes an epic struggle for the soul of Austria, actually, and for the Austrian Empire. But it never had to get that way. This is entirely the fault of Franz Josef because Franz Joseph really was the Emperor. All he had to do was say, that's enough, support his wife over his mother. And he didn't do it once. I mean, he never did it. All of Archducha Sophia's children, four boys, they were all scared to death of her. Her second son, who is Maximilian, who's going to be Emperor of Mexico, he knows his mother doesn't want to do it. He's too afraid to tell her himself that he's going to do it. He has to send his wife. I don't know what that woman had, but she really got them. So Cissy was crushed. They very definitely tried to crush her spirit. And it takes her forever. It takes her a really, really long time, but she will finally win in the end. And that was such a great day when I could finally write that she turned the tables a little bit.
- [17:58]
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- [19:32]
Nancy Goldstone
And did you explore anything about Eugenie's approach to Napoleon III's numerous affairs?
- [19:38]
Narrator
Well, Eugenie, actually she's a recognizable person. She's that one girlfriend we all have who always falls for the wrong guy. You know, one bad relationship after, she always thinks that this time it's gonna be different. This time he really loves me. This time he'll change. And she meets Napoleon III and he wants to marry her. And Napoleon III is in love at the time he gets married, but, you know, he didn't inherit any of his uncle's martial skills. Right. He's not a warrior in any way, but he is an Olympiad at adultery. I mean, the book is long and had to be that long just because he had so many affairs. And I couldn't even get him all in. You know, it's France. So he started cheating on her six months in. And I would say she gave him a son within three years. And after that, it was such a difficult delivery. She couldn't have any more children. And so of course then he started to cheat on her regularly, publicly. And they just kind of separated that way. But politically they stayed together because she was going to be regent. He trusted her enough with the politics and with protecting their son that he had to fall kind of in line and keep going.
- [20:43]
Nancy Goldstone
And beyond the personal, they were both at the center of many of the 19th century's most seismic events. This was an age when the Kingdom of Prussia was beginning to challenge the balance of power in Europe. And I was wondering, how did those events affect Sissy And Eugenie, it was.
- [20:56]
Narrator
Like a gigantic poker game where everybody's sitting at the table. You had to be a king or an emperor to sit at the table. And everyone's trying to out cheat the other person and everyone's trying to outsmart the other person. And. And Franz Josef, unfortunately, was nothe was an immediate target there because if you look around the table and you can't tell who it is, it's you, right? So Franz Josef is continually getting outsmarted by Napoleon III during this period. And he is losing and losing. He starts out he doesn't participate in the Crimean War. He says he's going to help Napoleon III and then he doesn't. That's a very bad thing to do. And the Russians thought that they were going to help him and he doesn't help them either. So he kind of isolates Austria that way. And then he loses in Italy against Napoleon iii. And all this time Sisi has no power at all. So there's nothing that she can do during all that. Her time is going to come. But she learns she can see what he's doing and she learns that the world is changing. She's a much more modern approach. Eugenie's right in there with Napoleon iii. Eugenie thinks that Napoleon III is a genius and so he teaches her how to do this foreign policy. And as a result of that, she's the one who goes and invades Mexico withputs Maximilian in as a figurehead there. And so she is much more involved in all these political events and she's regent through all these things. And so when she's regent during an event and of course, Ottoban Bismarck is smarter than any of them and. And he outwits both Franz Josef and Napoleon iii and that's when Germany becomes ascendant in this period.
- [22:43]
Nancy Goldstone
From him, the title of your book, of course, is the Rebel Empresses. And I was wondering if you could go into a little bit about how these two women defied the expectations of a woman of their status at this time. What made them different from, say, Queen Victoria in the United Kingdom?
- [22:57]
Narrator
Oh, that's interesting. Well, first of all, both of these women were very athletic, so it was something that I didn't. And they were rebels almost in that way. Sissy was the big rebel in that way because she set up a gymnasium in the palace. She would do exercises every morning. But Sissy's rebellion was much more personal than Eugenie's. Sissy rebelled against the idea of having to be married because she'd been married so Young, and she rebelled against the whole idea of it towards the end and just went off and did. She wanted to hunt, to become the greatest. She was so involved in athletics that she wanted to go back and she became a great horsewoman, one of the best in Europe. She wanted to just write her poetry. But this was all because of everything that had happened to her before. They broke her. And she put herself back together again, but she put herself back together kind of imperfectly, but she was modern in a sense of today's woman. She. She did not think she should live her life for her husband or she did not believe that Austria needed an empress. She said that she thought a republic would have been a better idea. And she definitely helped the Hungarians. She does something that no one else does in the entire century, and that is she orchestrates the nonviolent solution to a political struggle because Hungary wanted to remain in the Austrian Empire, but to have its own constitution and its own government. And Sisi made that possible, even though she's not credited with it. Of course, a man is credited with it, but the minister who does it had only been in office for three months, and Sissi had been at this for seven years, learning Hungarian, making the contacts. That's the only time I can think of in that entire century. They just didn't go into repression. And I have to say, it's the same thing if Ireland was asking for home rule, and it was basically the same thing, and if you'd had home rule back then, you might not have had so many problems later, but that was not the way it went in Britain. But when Cissy decides to go, when she finally frees herself from the entire idea of being an empress and having the same restrictions on her that had for centuries past, she's so modern that she feels sorry for her husband, and she arranges for an actress to take her role, basically, as his wife, does all the wifely duties for her while Sissy goes off and does her thing, which is, I must say, very modern. Eugenie was a rebel in a different way. Eugenie became early under the influence of a French philosopher by the name of Charles Feuillier, who was one of these utopian socialist kind of people. And he had a fringe theory that she fell for, which was that women should have equal rights and opportunities to men, and that societies who gave equal rights and opportunities to women succeeded. And those that did. I can't imagine why this resonated with her, but it did. And so she fought for womenshe was a. Fought for women's rights 50 years before it became popular. She did everything in her power while she was Empress to improve education for women, to get them job skills so they didn't have to rely on marriage to get them recognition for their efforts. She was the first one to get a woman into the salon, to get her the Legion of Honor. So, so in that way she really was a very big rebel.
- [26:29]
Nancy Goldstone
And Eugenie's life took a drastically different turn in 1870, didn't it?
- [26:33]
Narrator
Yes, in 1870. So in 1870 comes the Franco Prussian War, which the French lose spectacularly. And it's the Battle of Sedan and Napoleon III is there, she's in Paris as regent. And when they lose that battle, the Parisians are upset that they lost. They thought they should have won. And what they do is they overthrow the government. Now it had turned out actually that the year before this was notit was not an autocratic empire. The year before, Napoleon III had actually given back power to the people. He had become a constitutional monarch like you have in Britain. And so that it had been an elected assembly, they chose the ministers and they made the policy. And so when the people of Paris revolted, they actually revolted against a democratically elected government that was helpless. And Eugenie has to flee. They're attacking the Tuileries, they're attacking the Senate, everything. So she wanted to stay and negotiate a peace because, and in fact, if she had done that, they had allowed her to do that, they could have saved themselves a year of the Prussians surrounding Paris. Paris and starving them out. So she has to flee and she has nowhere to go. And this is one of the high points of the book for me because out of nowhere, first of all, Eugenie is the most famous face in France, so she can't go anywhere. She's got to find some way to get out of France. She's going to safety in England because Queen Victoria was her friend and would protect her. She's got to get to England though. Who does she turn to? She turns to her middle aged American dentist, Dr. Thomas Evans. You got to see a picture, it's in the book, but you got to see a picture of this guy. That's what a hero looks like. I mean, he leaps into action, he turns into like James Bond, out of nowhere, spirits her off in a carriage. He learns how to hold his newspaper up to hide her face. I mean, he does all this spy craft to get her out. It was just a fascinating story. And you can go to, you know, dentists are so underappreciated. Anyway, if you go to your dentist and say, did you know that you had a hero in your profession who saved the Empress? I did this with my dentist and, you know, he was so happy about it. He told me my teeth were fine, I didn't need any work on them.
- [29:00]
Nancy Goldstone
One of the most heartbreaking parallels in their lives is that they both lost their only sons, Crown Prince Rudolf and Louis Napoleon, the Prince Imperial. How did those deaths affect them?
- [29:11]
Narrator
So what happens is the empire falls in 1870, they put in the third republic in France, Eugenie and Napoleon III are in exile with their son, the Prince Imperial. They named everybody Louis Napoleon in the family. So it's impossible. We're just going to call him the Prince Imperial to start with. So Napoleon III is there, but Napoleon III dies like a year later. And that means that his son, the Prince Imperial now is going to be Napoleon IV. But the son is only 15, 14, 15 when his father dies, he's got to wait until he comes to his majority and he's got to try and get back the King. They don't want him back. The rep. The public doesn't want him back. But there's always the possibility, let's say, that he can be reinstated and he wants. Towhen he gets to be about 18 or 19. He wants to show that he's a great warrior, like, because all the Napoleons are great warriors. So Britain was at that time involved in war with the Zulus. And he begs to go to fight with his. He went to a military academy and all of his friends are down there fighting, and he wants to go and be one of them and help and all this stuff. And first the British government says no, and Eugenie certainly doesn't want him to go. But he begs and pleads. First of all, he was very short and he looked young, and he said, I'll always be little Napoleon if I don't do something. I have to do something to show that I'm worthy of this. And so she agrees and she asks her good friend Queen Victoria, can't we possibly arrange something? And Queen Victoria arranges for him to go down to fight against the Zulus, but just as an aide to a general, just as an observer, nothing. But of course, as soon as the kid gets there, he does what he wants, wants to do, and he goes out with the Hun. I mean, he isn't there. I don't think he's there a month or more before he goes out with an expedition to see what the land looks like, and he's out There resting with his comrades, and they're suddenly attacked by a bunch of Zulus. Everybody else gets on their horse and gallops away, but he's having trouble getting on his horse and the stirrup breaks or something and they leave him. And so he's surrounded by Zulus and he's killed, like I think they said, 50 spears in him or something like that. It was just terrible. PO and this destroys Eugene because she only had one child, because it was such a difficult delivery and she had everything invested in him. She loved him so much. And so she puts on black and doesn't come out of it after that. Sissy, her only son was named Rudolph, Archduke Rudolph, and he is the heir to all Franz Joseph's land. She wasn't allowed to raise her children. Archduchess Sophia, that was one of the biggest big bones of contention. Archduchess Sophia took her children away from her, which there was no precedent for at all, which Franz Joseph of course allowed because he had such an excellent mother and she would do such a much better job than his wife. But eventually, after like 10 years, Sissy rests them back and she makes sure that Rudolf, who is a very sensitive child and very much more like her, very romantic and artistic, she makes sure that he gets a lot of liberal tutors so that he is more modern than his father or his father's government, just like she was more progressive. He leans more towards France and Britain than Prussia, for example. And when he's 32 years old, he gets married, he has a daughter, and then he can't have any more children with the wife that he had. And he's 32 years old. In January of 1889, he's found dead in his haunting lodge at Meerlin, which is just outside of Vienna. He's in the bedroom, he's dead. And next to him is his 17 year old mistress, Baroness Mary Vetsera, who is also dead. And this is the scandal of the century. I mean, it makes the papers for months. And the court, the Imperial court, the Austrian Imperial Court, they are trying to, trying desperately to suppress the information. They're sending out one false story after another. Oh, he just had a heart attack. There's no girl there. Did you know that? They took that poor dead 17 year old and dressed her in her clothes, propped her up and took her out in a carriage, sitting up to pretend that she was still alive when she left. I mean, it was just ridiculous. All different stories. They're trying to suppress it, but it really was. The problem was it was Such a mystery. I have to say, I was so consumed by this mystery, I stayed up all night, like, weighing the evidence and everything, because was it. It was set up, obviously, to look like a suicide pact for love. But clearly Rudolph did not love that girl. And so was it a murder suicide, or was it a political assassination? And Cissy didn't see it. She just didn't see that her son was struggling. And after that, she also only wore black. And this is a bond. Empress Eugenie and Sissy meet at the end of their lives. You know, these beautiful, glamorous women meet when they're much older, all dressed in black, and they bond, like, so much at the end.
- [34:17]
Nancy Goldstone
And of course, for Cissy, tragedy didn't end there. She was assassinated in 1898. By that time, she'd become more reclusive, almost trying to escape her royal identity. Could you tell me about her final years and the circumstances of her death?
- [34:31]
Narrator
Because her life initially was so difficult. Okay. When you have a mother in law like Archduchess Sophia, you're not gonna come out of it. If it had been me, I'd have never gotten out of bed. Okay. I would never have had the courage to come back from it. And it isn't just our chat to Sophia. The whole court was against her for so long. It was such a pernicious environment. And when she finally breaks free and she decides to try and be herself again, it doesn't work. You can't go back to who you were before. She tries and she tries, but eventually she just, especially after Rudolph's death, retires into her room and writes. And on top of that, Sissy had been such a beautiful woman, and she was terrified of aging. And of course, if you're out in the sun all the time, you're going to get rings. She wouldn't let anyone photograph her. After a while, she held up a fan in front of her face. She maintained her figure, which was. If you ever go to Vienna and see the Sissy Museum, you can see how small the waists on the dresses are. They look likenot even a teenager. It's like preteen. That's how small her waist was. But I have to say, she was born just a little too early. How she would have loved plastic surgery. Boy, that was just what she. So she was very reclusive, and she just went around very quietly and did her thing. She would go hunting if she wanted to, or riding, or she would go visiting people. And she's in Switzerland in 1898. And at this time there's something called the anarchist movement is coming up. So there's an anarchist is hanging around in Switzerland, in Geneva, and he wants to assassinate the Duke of Orleans, whose been in the papers that the Duke of Orleans is going to be in this town, at this hotel, at this particular spot. And so he goes there, and wouldn't you know it, the guy left just before he got there. So he's got no one to assassinate. But turns out that even though she always went incognito, the papers knew who she was by that time. So they pointed out that Cissy was staying at this hotel in the same town. So not to let a good thing go, the anarchists. In fact, the papers say she's going to be taking a certain boat at a certain time to go visit her other friends someplace else. So he waits by the boat and he knows what she looks like because he'd actually been in Hungary, and she has a very famous face, even though she's veiled. He knows what her appearance is. He sees her coming and he stabs her with this little blade, such a tiny blade that she doesn't even know that she's been stabbed. She thinks he punched her. She falls over backwards, but because she has so much glorious hair, she hasn't even hit her head, really. It's all cushioned. But she gets up and said, what did that, man? She's got one lady in waiting with her. I mean, she's completely unarmed. What was that about? And I don't know. Why did that man push me down? I don't know. So they go on the boat, but what he had really done was he had stabbed her right through to her heart. And he knew it. And she collapses on the boat and they open her mouth and there's this trickle of blood and she's dead in a matter of hours. And she was the one who was always on the side of the common people. She was the person that they all loved. The lower class, it was the upper classes hated Sissy. So, you know, there was just no rhyme reason to it.
- [37:45]
Nancy Goldstone
Tragic irony.
- [37:46]
Narrator
Tragic.
- [37:47]
Nancy Goldstone
And of course, then there's Eugenie, who outlived almost everyone she'd ever known, dying in 1920, aged 94. She spent decades in exile after the fall of the second French Empire. I was wondering, how did she navigate those later years? And what do you think that chapter of her life says about her resilience as a woman?
- [38:04]
Narrator
Well, it was very difficult for her, especially after her son died. So she spends like 10 years building Chislehurst, which is the tomb. There's a tomb here in England where she is buried, where her son is buried, where Napoleon III is buried. And after she finished that, she wasn't buried there, then she got them there and set it all up. Something relieved in her. And she had plenty of money, so she went traveling around, and she went down to the south of France and bought a little villa. And she. She continued her charitable works as best she could. She had family, obviously, in Spain, and she looked after her nephew and nieces. But the things she lived through, though, were just amazing, because when you think of it, she started out with carriages and the railroad was just coming in, and by the end of her life, she had been driven in a motor car. She had seen an airplane. I mean, just amazing differences that she lived through. And what I really love about her is. And I didn't even get to put this in the book, but because they hated her in France for a long time because she was associated with the fall of the Empire and the Prussian invasion and all that stuff, which she didn't want to go to war with Prussia, they blamed them. They were convenient to blame. When she died, you know, she left the preponderance of her fortune to French charities. That's how much she believed that she was a French woman at heart, you know, that she was a part of that. So she was never bitter or anything like that. I admire her, even though I will say she made a terrible mistake with Mexico. But she owned to it. That was the thing. She owned to it. She said, okay, I really messed up there. Right?
- [39:50]
Nancy Goldstone
You've mentioned that the two women did meet during their lifetimes. And do we know anything about what they thought about each other?
- [39:56]
Narrator
We don't know what Cissy thought about Eugenie, except for the fact that she almost never hobnobbed with women, with empresses. She wasn't friendly with Queen Victoria, for example. One of the other things that Sissy's father had taught her, he had a contempt for pretense and for aristocratic privilege. Not for the privilege, but for thinking you were better than other people because you were born into it. And so she thought that there was a lot of pretension in the ruling classes, so she didn't usually seek out. She most definitely did not seek out another empress. But just the fact that she would see Eugenie every year said something. And also she was very honest with Eugenie, because she told Eugenie, before Rudolph shot himself at. If he did at Mire Lane, he wrote a letter while Mary Vet Serra was dead, sitting there he was alive for a couple of hours and the thing he did during that time was to write to his mother and tell her what happened. And that letter doesn't survive and Sissi never let even Franz Josef read it and her ladies in waiting destroyed it on her death. So we don't know what was in that letter except that Sissy. As far as I can tell, the only person Sissy told what was in that letter was Eugenie. And she told her it just towards the end of her life. So that would have showed a lot of confidence. Eugenie looked at Sissy and said this is a lost soul. This is just. It's like she's not even here anymore. Which was very different from. From Eugenie was still part of the world. She had political opinions and all that, but just that she would do that, that Sissy would do that. And then that's how you know what really happened. Which it never gets into any mireling book because nobody would think to look at what Empress Eugenie had to say about it except for somebody like me. So that's part of the mystery is explained there.
- [41:52]
Nancy Goldstone
That's fascinating. I didn't know that about the letter. Very interesting. Finally, Nancy, what do you hope readers take away from this book?
- [41:59]
Narrator
I think that it isn't that history repeats itself. It's more what Heine says that history informs every event that comes. And boy, there's a lot going on in the 19th century that informs what's going on today. We're kind of living through everything that we're living through today they already lived through in the 19th century. We already had fights about autocracy and democracy and whether we should have a government by the hero, which is what they call called Napoleonic rule. Well, really it depends on who your hero is. So I think that it will resonate to learn about this stuff and also just how modern these women were and just how compelling and entertaining this period was. It just lose yourself in this. It's just so much more fun.
- [42:49]
Advertiser
That was historian and author Nancy Goldstone who whose book the Rebel Elizabeth of Austria and Eugenie of Power and Glamour in the Struggle for Europe is out now, published by Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Nancy was speaking to Danny Bird. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.