EUGENIA, Saint: V. ADRIANO, CEMETERY of.
EUGENIA of Montijo, Empress of the French. — Born in Granada (Spain) on 5 May 1826, daughter of Cipriano Guzmán, Count of Teba and Montijo, and the American Maria Manuela Kirkpatrick; died in Madrid on 11 July 1920. After her mother was widowed, she moved to France, where she married Emperor Napoleon III on 30 January 1853. Deeply religious, she initially sympathized with the Italian unification movement, but when the Roman Question arose, she influenced her husband to keep French troops in Rome to prevent the city from becoming the capital of the Kingdom of Italy.
After the last French contingent left in late 1866 under the terms of the September Convention (1864), E. in the autumn of 1867, faced with repeated Garibaldi attacks and the complicit inaction of the Italian government, convinced the emperor to send a new expedition. This force, reinforcing the Pope’s troops, contributed to the outcome of the Battle of Mentana. Similarly, in 1869 she opposed a Franco-Austro-Italian alliance that would have meant the end of the Papal States. After the Empire’s collapse in 1870, she lived in exile in Farnborough, England.