[7] In later life, the Empress told Lady Helena Gleichen that "she was born in the middle of an earthquake and her mother was carried out of the house and laid under a tree, her family ever after used to mock at her saying, “ The mountain was in travail and it brought forth a mouse.”"[8] Eugenia's elder sister, Maria Francisca de Sales Palafox Portocarrero y Kirkpatrick, nicknamed "Paca", who inherited most of the family honours and was 14th Duchess of Peñaranda, Grandee of Spain and 9th Countess of Montijo, a title later ceded to Eugenia, married the 15th Duke of Alba in 1849.

[10] In 1837, Eugénie and Paca briefly attended a boarding school for girls on Royal York Crescent in Clifton, Bristol,[11] to learn English.

[17] Due to her mother's role as a lavish society hostess, Eugénie became acquainted with Queen Isabella II of Spain and the prime minister Ramón Narváez.

[24][25] In the United Kingdom, The Times made light of the latter concern, emphasizing that the parvenu Bonapartes were marrying into Grandees and one of the most important established houses in the peerage of Spain: "We learn with some amusement that this romantic event in the annals of the French Empire has called forth the strongest opposition and provoked the utmost irritation.

The Imperial family, the Council of Ministers, and even the lower coteries of the palace or its purlieus, all affect to regard this marriage as an amazing humiliation..." [citation needed] Eugénie found childbearing extraordinarily difficult.

[26] On 16 March 1856, after two-day labor that endangered mother and child and from which Eugénie made a prolonged recovery, the empress gave birth to an only son, Napoléon Eugène Louis Jean Joseph Bonaparte, styled Prince Impérial.

[32] She strongly advocated equality for women; she pressured the Ministry of National Education to give the first baccalaureate diploma to a woman and tried unsuccessfully to induce the Académie Française to elect the writer George Sand as its first female member.

According to Nancy Nichols Barker, "her ideas on the principles of government were ill formed and included a jumble of Bonapartism and Legitimism, whose incompatibility she seemed not to even recognize.

Her opposition to Italian unification earned her the enmity of Victor Emmanuel II of Italy, who stated that "the emperor is weakening visibly and the empress is our enemy and works with the priests.

Much to Eugénie's chagrin, Thouvenel negotiated an agreement to wind down the French military presence in exchange for a guarantee of papal sovereignty from the new Italian kingdom.

Pertevniyal became outraged by the forwardness of Eugénie taking the arm of one of her sons while he gave a tour of the palace garden, and she slapped the empress on the stomach as a reminder that they were not in France.

[44][42] The British satirical magazine Punch christened her variously as the "Queen of Fashion", "Imperatrice de la Mode", "Countess of Crinoline", and "Goddess of the Bustles".

[46][47] In the late 1860s, she caused a shift in fashion by turning against the crinoline and adopting Worth's "new" slimmer silhouettes with the skirt gathered in the back over a bustle.

She collected her portraits and trinkets, lived in her suite at Saint-Cloud, had constructed a small model of the Petit Trianon in the park, and frequently engaged Hübner in lugubrious conversation about the fate of the martyred queen.

[51] She carefully curated the displays of her museum, constituting diplomatic gifts given to her by an embassy from Siam in 1860, as well as loot taken from the Old Summer Palace outside Beijing by French troops during the Second Opium War.

[51] In 1854, Emperor Napoleon III and Eugénie bought several acres of dunes in Biarritz and gave the engineer Dagueret the task of establishing a summer home surrounded by gardens, woods, meadows, a pond and outbuildings.

[55] The presence of the imperial couple attracted other European royalty like the British monarchs Queen Victoria and the Spanish king Alfonso XIII and made Biarritz well-known.

The Empress held anti-Prussian views and disliked the North German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, for what she perceived as his "meddling" in Spanish affairs.

[56][57][58] Maxime du Camp claimed that, after the Prussian victory over Austria in 1866, the Empress would often state that "Catholic France could not support the neighborhood of a great Protestant power.

[57] Adolphe Thiers included her, the foreign secretary the Duc de Gramont, Émile Ollivier, and the military in the pro-war camp behind the Emperor, who was himself indecisive.

[56] After the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, Eugénie remained in Paris as Regent while Napoleon III and the Prince Imperial travelled to join the troops at the German front.

Prime Minister Émile Ollivier and the chief of staff of the army, Marshal Le Bœuf, both resigned, and Eugenie took it upon herself to name a new government.

[61] Later, when hostile crowds formed near the Tuileries Palace and the staff began to flee, the empress slipped out with one of her entourage and sought sanctuary with her American dentist, Thomas W. Evans, who took her to Deauville.

[63] When the Second Empire was overthrown after France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the empress and her husband took permanent refuge in England and settled at Camden Place in Chislehurst, Kent.

[64] In 1885, she moved to Farnborough, Hampshire, and to the Villa Cyrnos (named after the ancient Greek for Corsica), which was built for her at Cape Martin, between Menton and Nice, where she lived in retirement, abstaining from politics.

[66][67] Her deposed family's friendly association with the United Kingdom was commemorated in 1887 when she became the godmother of Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg (1887–1969), daughter of Princess Beatrice, who later became queen consort of Alfonso XIII of Spain.

[68] The former empress died on 11 July 1920, aged 94, during a visit to her relative the 17th Duke of Alba, at the Liria Palace in Madrid in her native Spain, and she is interred in the Imperial Crypt at St Michael's Abbey, Farnborough, with her husband and her son.

[73][citation needed] De Heeren collected jewelry and was fond of the empress as both were considered to be the "Queens of Biarritz"; both spent summers on the Côte Basque.

[75] More representative of the empress' actual apparel, however, was the late 19th-century fashion of the Eugénie paletot, a women's greatcoat with bell sleeves and a single button enclosure at the neck.