EUGENIA di Montijo, empress of the FRENCH. – Born in Granada (Spain) on 5 May 1826, to Cipriano Guaman, count of Teba and Montijo, and the American Maria Manuela Kirkpatrick; died in Madrid on 11 July 1920. She went with her widowed mother to France, where on 30 January 1853 she married the emperor Napoleon III. Deeply religious, she was initially sympathetic to the Italian unification movement, but when the Roman question arose, she influenced her husband to maintain the French troops in Rome in order to prevent the city from becoming the capital of the Kingdom of Italy.
After the departure of the last French contingent toward the end of 1866, in accordance with the September Convention (1864), E., in the autumn of 1867, faced with repeated Garibaldian attacks and the Italian government’s complicit inertia, persuaded the emperor to send a new expedition which, by lending support to the Pontiff’s forces, contributed to the outcome of the battle of Mentana. Thus, in 1869 as well, she opposed a Franco-Austro-Italian alliance, which would have meant the end of temporal power. After the collapse of the Empire in 1870, she lived in exile at Farnborough, in England.