Eugénie de Montijo, Empress of the French

EUGÉNIE DE MONTIJO, Empress of the French. - B. at Granada (Spain) on 5 May 1826, to Cipriano Guaman, count of Teba and of Montijo, and to the American Maria Manuela Kirkpatrick, d. at Madrid on 11 July 1920. She went with her mother, who had been left a widow, to France, where on 30 Jan. 1853 she married the emperor Napoleon III. Deeply religious, she at first felt sympathy for the Italian unification movement, but when the Roman question was raised, she influenced her husband to keep the French troops in Rome in order to prevent the city from becoming the capital of the Kingdom of Italy.

After the last French contingent departed toward the end of 1866 under the terms of the September Convention (1864), E. in the autumn of 1867, faced with the repeated Garibaldian attacks and with the conniving inertia of the Italian government, convinced the emperor to send a new expedition which, giving strong support to the Pontiff's militias, contributed to the outcome of the battle of Mentana. Thus also in 1869 she opposed a Franco-Austro-Italian alliance, which meant the end of the temporal power. After the collapse of the Empire in 1870, she lived in exile at Farnborough, in England.

Silvio Forlani