Empress Eugénie’s shrine to the Bonapartes

The empress Eugénie – the Spanish-born last empress-consort of France, wife of Napoleon III, mother of the prince imperial – lived for the last 40 years of her life in Farnborough, between the military towns of Aldershot and Sandhurst. There she created a home, museum, mausoleum and chantry in commemoration of the first and second French empires.  Farnborough Hill was the place she chose ‘après que tout fut fini’ (after it was all over). 

In 1870, Eugénie had accompanied her husband into exile in England, following the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War.  Together with their teenage son, they lived in Camden Place, a large country house in Chislehurst. Three years later, Napoleon III died after an operation to remove a bladder stone, and all hopes for an imperial restoration were concentrated on their son. Desperate to prove his military prowess in the Bonaparte family tradition, the prince imperial persuaded his mother to let him go to South Africa with the British army, where he was killed on a reconnaissance expedition in 1879. On the first anniversary of his death, Eugénie travelled to the grasslands where he was stabbed 18 times, then went on to St Helena to visit Longwood House, where Napoleon I had died, after being refused exile in England. 

Back from her pilgrimage, deeply grieving, she purchased the Farnborough Hill estate in Hampshire and, following the example of her friend Queen Victoria, who had buried Prince Albert at Frogmore in the grounds of Windsor Castle, set about commissioning a mausoleum that would be the final resting place for herself, her husband and her son. She entrusted the mausoleum to the community of monks at St Michael’s Abbey, and it became their church. After Eugénie died in 1920, aged 94, her collection of Napoleonic memorabilia and other possessions were dispersed.