Rival Empresses: Eugénie and Elisabeth with Nancy Goldstone

Today’s special episode is an interview with author Nancy Goldstone. Goldstone has authored numerous books about powerful women in history, including: The Rival Queens: Catherine de’ Medici, Her Daughter Marguerite de Valois, and the Betrayal That Ignited a Kingdom, Four Queens:  The Provençal Sisters Who Ruled Europe and The Maid and the Queen: The Secret History of Joan of Arc. Today we are talking about her latest book, The Rebel Empresses: Elisabeth of Austria and Eugénie of France, Power and Glamour in the Struggle for Europe, an engaging book that details the lives of two 19th century empresses, one ruling over the Second French Empire and the other on the Austrian throne.

Gary

Thank you very much for being on the show, Nancy Goldstone. Your book, The Rebel Empresses: Elizabeth of Austria and Eugenie of France, Power and Glamour in the Struggle for Europe, is a fascinating biography of two very powerful women. Before we get into your most recent book, I want to talk about your bibliography in general.

You have written a number of books about powerful women. What drew you to these figures and can you give any insight on what made them unique?

Nancy

Well, so I'm actually the person who writes about all the most important and influential women in European history who nobody has ever heard of. And the way I stumbled into this was, I was reading a medieval chronicle because they obviously exposed me to Camelot, it to impressionable in age. So I'm reading this medieval chronicle.

And I come across a reference to a family of four 13th century sisters, the daughters of the Count of Provence, who all became queens. Queen of France, Queen of England, Queen of Germany, and Queen of Sicily, all at the same time. Very cool. I was immediately intrigued. I wanted to learn more about them, so I tried to get a book about them so I could learn. And I hunted around, I hunted around, I hunted around.

And eventually I realized that if I wanted to read about these women, I was going to have to write the book myself. So that's what I did. And that book was so much fun to write, really. But more importantly, the sisters' lives were so clearly integral to the period that I really don't understand how anyone can understand the 13th century without that family.  I began to wonder if this was true of anyone else. You know, maybe there were other important and influential women in European history who nobody had ever heard of. So I looked into the next century, the 14th century, and sure enough, right out of the research, a name just leapt out at me. It was Joanna I. She was queen of Naples, Jerusalem, and Sicily. Oh my goodness, what an amazing life she had.   And then I finished that book, I looked into the next century, the 15th century, and there was the woman who brought Joan of Arc to the court of the Dauphin and on and on, century by century, from starting in the 13th all the way up until now, I can hardly believe it, I'm in the 19th. And the thing was that in every one of those centuries, I found women, some of them very inspiring, some of them not so much, but all of them completely necessary to understanding what was going on at the time. So that is why I started to do this. That's how this hell came about.

Gary

 Well, what an incredible bibliography you have, you're nearing the contemporary period. Let's talk about the two main characters of your most recent book. These two women grew up in the tumultuous period following the Napoleonic Wars. Can you explain how Napoleon directly impacted the lives of both of their families?

Nancy

I think Napoleon impacted the lives of everyone who lived in Europe during this century.  So we'll start with Empress Elizabeth, who goes more familiarly by her childhood nickname of Sissy. And Sissy comes from Bavaria. And although she was born in Munich in 1837, Christmas Eve 1837. Bavaria was a kingdom, but today it has a kind of bad reputation, but at the time Bavaria was a very progressive place when Sissy grew up because of Napoleon. Napoleon had taken over, Bavaria had allied with Napoleon originally and they had a constitution, they had a monarchy, they also had an elected assembly, they had freedom of the press, they had freedom of the religion, these were all things that came from Napoleon from when Napoleon had ruled and they stuck in Bavaria and it worked in Bavaria. So that is how

the family she marries into was not conquered by Napoleon. They fought him. It was the Habsburg family. It was the Austrians. And they had a much more conservative view of politic of government. There they wanted it and they had a military regime. They had an autocracy. And so there was a clash between Sissy and her husband and his family. So that affected Empress Elizabeth. Empress Eugenie was basically, she was a French, she was gonna be Empress of the French, but she was born in Spain in 1826, and Napoleon had a huge effect on Spain. His brother, he took it over, he put his brother in power again with the Constitution, although the Spanish fought him, but this is how, Napoleon was like like Johnny Appleseed,

only with constitutions. Wherever he went, he gave the country a constitution because that was one of, first of all, he believed in the principles of the French Revolution. He believed in that a constitution, that opportunity should go to every people who weren't just in the upper classes. But also it was a way of getting the the common people on his side.  There were a lot of people wanted this kind of a government.

And so Eugenie's father  fought for Napoleon and just instilled her with this admiration for him. So it was not surprising that she later grew up and married his nephew, Napoleon III.

Gary

Both Eugenie and Sissy had older sisters who overshadowed them. How did these young women break out and become the most powerful figures in their households?

Nancy

Well, Sissy was quite by accident. Believe me, she did was not looking to do that. Sissy was not an ambitious woman at all.  And she was only 15 when she became engaged. And actually, what was supposed to happen was that her fiancé or our future husband, Franz Joseph, who was the emperor of Austria, he was supposed to marry her older sister who was 19. Franz Joseph was 23, and he was supposed to marry Sissy's older sister Helene who was 19. But Franz Joseph didn't really, they had never really met Helene. He had never met, his mother who wanted him to marry Helene. So he went and he met Helene and they just by accident,  they brought Sissy along too because Franz Joseph had younger brothers and maybe she would be interesting. She was only 15 and he decides to ditch Helene very publicly and proposes instead to Sissy, who's only 15. And I just have to say that they were lucky that they left the 11-year-old at home because who knows what this man was thinking, 23 and 15. So Sissy became empress, not really understanding at all what that was going to mean. So she only became overshadow of her older sister because of that, because she was chosen and not her.

Eugenie, her older sister, was only older by a year and a half. They were very, very close. And  her mother was very ambitious socially. Eugenie's mother was very ambitious socially. And she married Paca to one of the richest men in Spain, who was age appropriate. He was 18, Paca was 16 or 17 so, but Eugenie had fallen in love with him too and and her mother didn't let her do that, let her marry.  Discourage him from marrying the younger one. And then Eugenie was just one of these women who had terrible, I have to say she had terrible taste in men and she would fall in love with inappropriate, with people who broke her heart.

And eventually she married, she and Sissy actually are married within a year of each other. So they begin their reigns almost at the same time, but Eugenie waited until she was well into her twenties to marry the man who became Napoleon III,  Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew.  When she married him then of course she became much more important and prestigious and influential than her sister who was just married to a very wealthy man in Spain.

Gary

Both Eugenie and Sissy married emperors. What were their relationships like with their powerful husbands?

Nancy

Well, Sissy was actually, because she was so young, this was the first time she was ever in love with anyone, really. She had she had a crush on somebody before this, but she didn't know the difference. And she had,  they were in love, but she had no power because his mother, he and his mother ran Austria and so she was she was an empress in the beginning for the first 10 years or so, she was an empress in name only. She had no power. She was there to have children and be decorative. She was a very free spirited woman. She loved poetry. She was athletic. Oh my goodness.  Today she would have been a college athlete or maybe even professional. She was that quality of athlete and they wanted her to sit inside and, and talk, learn French and talk to her ladies all day. So she had a very, very difficult time of it in the beginning of her reign, the first 10 years, basically.

But Eugenie, that was a different story. She hit the ground running. She and Napoleon III  had a very definite idea of what he wanted to do to modernize France. He believed that economic power, that technology was very important and that in the future France needed to to go into the next century. This is how they would be powerful. And Eugenie was part of that effort in that they wanted to bring people to Paris. They wanted to remake Paris. They wanted to make ah culture and arts and fashion and be something that drew people into the city. And she was responsible for all of that, the parties, the fashion, that all of that.  And she did a fantastic job. This is when the French Second Empire starts and they host,  exhibition universal,  world's fairs and and she's in every newspaper and that all the fashion goes out all over Europe and even to America. So she was a very big part of that.

Gary

So you hinted at this just now, but putting aside their husbands for the moment, what impact did these women have on society and politics?

Nancy

Well, Sissy had a very important effect on the empire, but it takes a long time. The person that Sissy was actually up against in Austria was her mother-in-law, Archduchess Sophia. And Archduchess Sophia was a very important figure at the time and she was one of those less inspiring people that I would write about because Archduchess Sophia was actually a barracuda, she's completely ruthless.

She orchestrated a coup, a military coup, in which she deposed not only her brother-in-law, the emperor, but also her own husband, who was legally in line for the next in line for the throne. She deposed both of them. And she put in her 18-year-old son, Franz Joseph, very obedient kid, as emperor instead.

Then she and her generals instituted a military authoritarian, they declared martial law and they instituted an authoritarian regime that was so repressive and frankly vindictive, and they did it throughout the empire. This empire, this is composed of Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, which is Czech Republic today, and parts of Italy, the ah the northern part of Italy, Venetia, Venice, and  Milan. And they institute this repressive, repressive regime that it was so vindictive that the Tsar of Russia protested. And do you have any idea how brutal you have to be for the Tsar of Russia to think you're barbaric? But that was her vision. She wanted to set everything back to its previous centuries.  Not only did she do that, she also instituted the in Inquisition again in Austria throughout the empire, so that there was no freedom of religion. Protestants weren't allowed to worship openly in Austria at this time.  The priesthood took over education. They they had no freedom of the press. And so into this regime comes Sissy who has had this different background where there's a constitution, where there's freedom of the press, where in Bavaria, the king had been Catholic and the queen had been Protestant. So that clash between them takes a very, but Sissy is only 16 when she's married and they do everything they can to,

keep her down. Whenever she starts to get a little power, they use the press, and they used her own child's death against her. So it takes Sissy a very long time, but in the end, she will do something that no one in the whole century did, which is to keep Hungary as part of the... she she's the person who arranges for a compromise between Austria and Hungary, so that there is a non-violence power-sharing solution to the empire. And today somebody would get the Nobel Prize for that. But, and it was the only time that I could find in that entire century where political differences were resolved without recourse to violence. It'd take her a long time to overthrow her mother-in-law's influence over Franz Joseph, because for a very long time, Franz Joseph was in agreement with his mother and ran it the way his mother thought, the way he believed also. Eugenie was a different, it was it different because she, her husband was, they had, they shared the ideals pretty much of making Franz making France great again. They wanted to bring France back to its glory days of the first Napoleon, of the first empire.  So she  was an active participant in that. She unfortunately, in order to help the empire, arranged the whole Mexican venture with Maximilian, so her record there was mixed. But she was excellent, both of them were excellent domestically and at building France up into a power again.

Gary

So on that note,  both women oversaw a tumultuous period in their country's history. The Second Empire was overthrown and Austria faced frequent agitation among Hungarians and other ethnic groups for more rights. You've touched on this a bit, but can you go more in depth on how these women navigated the changing nature of the world around them?

Nancy

Well, Sissy did not do, because it took her so long and she was so brutalized basically by the court, it was  emotionally and psychologically, not physically, but because it took her so long, it she would end up being,  after  she helps keep Hungary, she would actually not want to be an empress at all anymore. She just wanted to have a private life and she was a little bit,  she was scarred by that experience. So emotionally she becomes very different.  She wanders the world and she tries to get her life what her life back, what it would have been if she had never married an emperor.  She goes back to athletics, she goes back to poetry, all the things that she wished she had done before. But Eugenie, she had to really deal step by step with the problems because she she was not just a figure and she was not just there for the fashion and the parties and all that. She actually grew into the job of being a regent and it and helping politically and socially with the country. And the problem was that her husband, Napoleon III, he basically, well, actually, Archduchess Sophia started the whole problem when she invited  Russia in to help restrain Hungary. But when Austria,  when the Crimean War started, Austria didn't want to, Franz Josef didn't want to side with the Russians and he didn't really want to side, he wanted to keep out of it, but that was not available to him.  He couldn't just be neutral so he eventually tried to go over to the French side and the French and English side, but he never honored his commitments.  This really angered Napoleon III so to get even he arranged for Italy, he decided on the side of Victor Emmanuel in Italy to oust the Austrians from their holdings and in Venice and Milan. and as a result, he started this ball rolling where everybody  started to interfere with everybody else.

Events got out of hand and eventually he's going to have to face Bismarck because he's just double and triple intrigued against everybody and Eugenie has to keep up with that. She has to try and keep France safe and it didn't work.

Gary

Both of these women lived through the tragic death of their sons, who were also the heir apparent. Can you detail these tragedies and the impact they had on our two main figures?

Nancy

Well, Sissy's son was Rudolph, the Crown Prince Rudolph, she had one son. And Crown Prince Rudolph was involved in the Scandal of the Century. He was found when he was 32 years old, he was married, he had a child, he had a daughter, and he is found dead in his hunting lodge at Mayerling. with a 17 year old mistress beside him. And this becomes a huge, huge international sensation because it is unclear whether this was a love of suicide pact, a murder suicide or a political assassination. And for years, people didn't really know and  what had happened at Mayerling there. But in the hours before he died, the last letter he wrote was to his mother because he she was the closest one to him in the family. And when Sissy died the letter was destroyed so we didn't really know what happened. But Eugenie also lost her son because her son went to fight for Britain against the Zulus, and he died within two months of getting to Africa. And she lost her only son. So they had a bond, these two empresses, that no one else had. They had both been empresses, they had both lived through all of this turmoil, sometimes on opposite sides, sometimes together.

And so Sissy actually in the end confided to Eugenie what had happened, what that letter that her son said to her when he died at Mayerling. So that is how the mystery can be solved now. So this is kind of cool that they that was an effect of this.

Gary

Absolutely. Eugenie died in 1920, having lived to 94, while Sissy was assassinated at the age of 60 in 1898. Can you describe their winter years and perhaps the legacy they left behind?

Nancy

So Sissy, once she was crowned Queen of Hungary, once she made that happen, she stopped really being an empress because the Austrians, especially the conservative aristocracy in Vienna, did not want to give up power to the Hungarians.

And they said all kinds of very, they put out a lot of slanderous statements against her. And she just didn't think that they she should have to deal with that anymore. And I have to say, I don't blame her.  And so she behaved more like a private citizen than she did an empress.

She did try to go back, she became she took up her, she had always been a wonderful writer, but now she really spent a lot of time in England becoming one of the most famous and professional women, or not professional, but one of the most expert women writers probably in Europe.

Even though she was already in her 30s and 40s when this happened. Then when she couldn't write anymore she would walk for 20 miles a day and people couldn't hardly keep up with her. And she devoted herself to her poetry because she really, she was a devotee of Heinrich Heine, who was kind of the Bob Dylan of his day. He was a poet, he was a Jewish poet, a German Jewish poet who was revolutionary. And she just, her father had loved these,  they had loved his work and he instilled the lovingness of them in her. And she tried to emulate him with her own poetry. And I have to say the poetry is just,  his poetry is haunting.

Her legacy unfortunately has become that she was kind of this lone rambling woman kind of   who had all this tragedy in her life.  And so her political influence, people don't really see, they don't see what she had done. They mostly focus today on how strange she was in the aftermath at the end of her life, just wandering around and doing what she wanted. Eugenie was a whole different story. Eugenie the Empire was overthrown during the Franco-Prussian War and there's been absolutely, I think, a deliberate attempt to forget about her on the part of the French and also Napoleon III, all the good things that they did in their empire, because it was very convenient to blame the Franco-Prussian war on and them, when in fact, that was not the case. At the time when the Franco-Prussian war occurred, there was actually  Napoleon III and Eugenie had stepped back. They had given over, they had become, instead of an empire, they had become a constitutional monarchy with an elected government and it was the elected government that went to war. But somebody of course has to blame for all this stuff so they blame her and her legacy is I hope will be I hope we can bring her back a little because all the railroads that were put in were put in during the empire.

There were  major improvements in science, Paris becomes modern, and certainly all the hot couture and everything that they are so proud of today in France came from Eugenie. She was the person who basically sold this image to the rest of Europe. So I hope that she gets to come back a little now.

Gary

Well, you've preempted me again, but perhaps focusing a bit more on Sissy, my final question was going to be, what takeaways do you want to give your readers as they read about these two remarkable women?

Nancy

Well, first of all, the reason I did Sissy and Eugenie together  was because you cannot really understand the one without the other. There have been many biographies of Sissy and without understanding what it was like to be another empress at the time, you can't understand what she was really going through. And if she turned out to appear a little strange at the end, I wonder how many other people who lived through what she lived through or wouldn't have come out a little strange at the end also. And I think that what we should start to to know them for now that we have had its time to step back and we can look back in history and see what happened afterwards was how important they were.

Here in America, the 19th century is given over to the Victorian age. It's Victoria, Victoria, Victoria, and that's true Victoria was a long-running empress and she was an important empress, but she wasn't the only important empress. And England really stayed out away a lot from what was happening on the continent during this period, and Sissy and Eugenie were right in it. So I think that if we really want to understand whats what happens in history, we have to look at their experiences and be clear eyed about what they did write what they did and what they didn't do and what was important about their reigns and what wasn't maybe so important. So I'm hoping that because a lot of patriotism is always tied up in how these countries look back at their history. And it's so easy to blame a woman. They called Eugenie the Spanish woman the way they used to call maria Marie Antoinette the Austrian woman.

And I don't think she actually deserved that. And certainly Sissy deserves better than just being  being scolded basically for not being a typical empress.  What she did was so much more important than what  ordinary empress usually even does. Because it's really hard to negotiate a peaceful transfer of power especially during this period. And she was absolutely instrumental. It would not have happened without her.

Gary

The book is The Rebel Empresses: Elizabeth of Austria, and Eugenie of France, Power and Glamour in the Struggle for Europe. Thank you very much for being on the show.

Nancy

Thank you so much for having me.