© D'après Franz Xaver Winterhalter / Wikimedia Commons · public-domain
Impératrice Eugénie
1826-1920
The last sovereign of France, Eugénie de Montijo was Spanish. Born in Granada in 1826, the daughter of the Count of Teba, she married Napoléon III in January 1853, shortly after the Empire was proclaimed.
Empress of the French from 1853 until the fall of the Second Empire, she served as regent during the Franco-Prussian War in the summer of 1870. An arbiter of elegance, she brought to the court a taste for the Louis XVI style that influenced all of Europe.
At the Château de Compiègne, in northern France, she was the driving force behind the fall house parties, where writers, scholars, and artists mingled. Several of her portraits, including one after Winterhalter, are still kept there.
After the fall of the Empire in 1870, she spent a very long exile in England and died in 1920 at the age of ninety-four.
