Empress Eugénie

Spanish by birth, French by marriage and English by exile, Eugénie de Montijo was the last empress of the French and one of the great tastemakers of the nineteenth century. In Biarritz she turned a fishing town into a royal resort, and her summer villa, rebuilt after her reign, lives on as the Hôtel du Palais.

A countess from Granada

She was born in Granada on 5 May 1826, the daughter of Cipriano de Palafox y Portocarrero, Count of Montijo, and María Manuela Kirkpatrick, who had Scottish ancestry. Her education was cosmopolitan: the convent of the Sacré-Cœur in Paris in 1835–1836, then the Gymnase Normal, and in 1837 a boarding school in Clifton, near Bristol. The writer Prosper Mérimée, a friend of the family, took an interest in her schooling.

Empress of the French

She met Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, then Prince-President, at a reception at the Élysée on 12 April 1849. Once he had become Napoleon III, he married her in a civil ceremony at the Tuileries on 29 January 1853, followed the next day by a religious wedding at Notre-Dame. Their only son, the Prince Imperial, was born on 16 March 1856. Eugénie acted as regent three times, in 1859, 1865 and 1870, and travelled to Egypt for the inauguration of the Suez Canal.

The imperial couple lived at the Tuileries Palace, close to Le Meurice, which had moved to the rue de Rivoli in 1835. Eugénie set the tone of fashion with her vast crinolines, and Charles Frederick Worth became her favoured couturier. Her prestige reached London too: in 1860 Queen Victoria came to Claridge’s to visit her, a call the hotel still counts as the start of its tradition of royal visits.

The Villa Eugénie

In 1854 the emperor decided to give her a summer residence in Biarritz. Hippolyte Durand, architect of the Basses-Pyrénées department, designed a house in brick-and-stone Louis XIII style, built between late 1854 and the summer of 1855. From 1856 to 1868 the Villa Eugénie hosted brilliant gatherings of European nobility, and with them Biarritz became a fashionable resort.

The house grew with the reign. Louis-Auguste Couvrechef, first appointed as deputy inspector, eventually replaced Durand; Gabriel-Auguste Ancelet, appointed in 1859, added a wing, and Auguste Lafollye built a dairy and a sheepfold and raised the villa by one storey in 1867. The emperor and empress stayed there for the last time in 1868.

From villa to palace hotel

The fall of the Empire in September 1870 ended the dream. Helped by the American dentist Thomas W. Evans, Eugénie fled Paris, reached Deauville and landed in England on 7 September 1870; the family settled at Camden Place in Chislehurst. Napoleon III died there in 1873 and the Biarritz villa passed to her. In 1879 the Prince Imperial was killed fighting in the Zulu War.

In 1881 Eugénie sold the villa to the Banque de l’Union parisienne, which turned it into a hotel and casino, the Palais Biarritz. Renamed Hôtel du Palais in 1893–1894, it burned and was rebuilt between 1903 and 1905 by Édouard-Jean Niermans on the walls of the old villa, keeping its E-shaped plan and Louis XIII façades.

Exile and legacy

In 1885 Eugénie moved to Farnborough Hill in Hampshire, and in her old age she also had the Villa Cyrnos built at Cap Martin on the Riviera. She outlived her century, dying on 11 July 1920 at the Liria Palace in Madrid, and was buried beside her husband and son at St Michael’s Abbey in Farnborough.

Her villa remains the heart of Biarritz. The Hôtel du Palais, awarded the French “palace” distinction in 2011, hosted the G7 summit in 2019 and reopened on 3 June 2022 after a renovation of nearly 70 million euros. It still bears, in its plan and in its very name, the memory of the empress who invented the resort.

Sources Wikipedia (EN), “Eugénie de Montijo” · Wikipedia (FR), “Hôtel du Palais” · Wikipedia (EN), “Le Meurice” · Claridge’s, history press release (2016)