Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

En esta nueva edición de Cuadernos de Investigación Educativa compartimos con ustedes destacados artículos tanto de autores nacionales como internacionales. Sus aportes, de gran relevancia, nos ayudan a comprender las distintas problemáticas y los desafíos de la agenda educativa actual.

We try to trace the profiles of a profile of Doña Eugenia, based on what we have entitled "A hermeneutical approach to the Oxford and Barcelona speeches of 1940-47", of the former Duke of Alba and Director of the Royal Academy of the History, his great-nephew D. Jacobo Fitz-James Stuart y Falcó, about whom he considered his grandmother, Empress Eugenia de Montijo, whom he treated from childhood, in the various stages and moments of his life, in a relationship endearing that culminated when he welcomed her into his own home, already in Spain, at the end of his days.

During the Crimean War (1853-1856), the Spanish government was re-peatedly invited by the Allied powers - France and Britain - to join their military and diplomatic alliance against the Russian Empire. In this con-text, Empress Eugenie tried to have her brother-in-law, the Duke of Alba, carry out a delicate and secret unofficial mission: to know the reaction of the Madrid government if France presented him with the offer to organize a brigade of Spanish volunteers bound for Crimea. Given the failure of this administration, some historians, such as Jean des Cars, belittled the ability of the Spanish political elite of this moment, unlike that of the kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia. However, other factors must be taken into account - economic, social and military - that explain this failure, as well as most of the pressures that, before and after, the allies exerted on Spain.

Eugenia de Montijo is, in her centenary, a forgotten figure, a romantic image who, according to her opponents from Victor Hugo to Zola, participated in an operetta system or regime, the second French empire. The noble grenadine wanted to win the friendship of the French by promoting war on the Protestant Prussian. The latent and constant threat that hung over France. From 1856, the date on which the imperial heir was born, Euge-nia had a growing ascendancy in the politics of her new country. A few days after the Franco-German war broke out, Eugenia was named regent on July 27, on September 1 Napoleon III capitulated in Sedan. The two Napo-leons, prisoner of Bismarck abdicated. On the 4th the Third Republic was proclaimed, Gambetta fled Paris to Bordeaux to continue the resistance. Eugenia was exiled to England. The disaster would bring consequences of enormous dimensions not only to France but to all of Europe, in March the Commune and civil war broke out in Paris. Eugenia only looked at her son, Napoleon died of a gallbladder operation at the beginning of 1873, and a widow, in June 1879 the imperial prince died, it was the end of all hope for the former empress.

On December 2, 1852, Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, until then president of the Second French Republic, proclaimed the creation of the Second French Empire after a coup that months ago had strengthened the powers of the executive and diminished those of the legislative chambers. , thus generating a feeling of perplexity among the old European royalty, some of whose members still remembered the turbulent and turbulent years in which their uncle, the great Napoleon, had forever changed the map of Europe. That dynasty of parvenus, the Bonaparte, was once again playing strongly on the great European board and soon the whole of Paris of the influential and important was going to begin to speculate on the necessary marriage of the new emperor, who in his younger years He had expressed his desire to marry his cousin-sister, Princess Matilda, daughter of his old uncle Jerome Bonaparte, who decades ago had been fleeting King of Westphalia.

In 1853 she became Empress of the French by marriage. The social rise of the Spanish woman caused a flood of information in the Press extolling the benefits of the one chosen by Napoleon III. Her links with the Spanish aristocracy - her mother had tried to make her related to the Duke of Sesto - and the role of her sister Paca, Duchess of Alba, made Eugenia de Guzmán and Portocarrero a different candidate than many " marriages ”could have been suspected. She had no family in France to showcase honor and dignity, as the Emperor himself made clear when in 1853 he presented his fiancée to the official state corporations. A priori, her position could seem limited to the institutional role conferred by her new rank and reduced to tasks of a social or welfare nature, which she will also perform with solvency. However, the strategic-military circumstances of the Third French Empire, as well as the character of the protagonist, will lead the Empress Eugenia to occupy notable positions of political responsibility.

The commemoration of the 1st centenary of the death of Empress Eugenia seems to us to be sufficient excuse to reconsider the political vision about this character in historiography. It is commonplace, and very generally accepted as true, that she was an ambitious woman, hungry for power and wealth, interested and intriguing. And it is also generally accepted that her influence in aspects of international politics was greater than in the internal affairs of the Second Empire. And, in this field, two issues of great importance in her time usually stand out: the French intervention in Mexico in the 60s of the 19th century and the Franco-Prussian War, the result of which was lethal for the reign of Napoleon III.

This year has been the hundredth anniversary of the death of the Empress of the French, Eugenia de Montijo, on July 11, 1920, at the Palacio de Liria in Madrid. María Eugenia Ignacia Agustina, was the second daughter of Don Cipriano Palafox y Portocarrero and of Doña María Manuela Kirkpatrick de Glosburn and Grivegnee, Counts of Teba, Marquises of Ardales ... she was born in Granada on Calle de Gracia number 12, on May 5 In 1826 (the fifth anniversary of Napoleon's death), he lived ninety-four years in which Spain and the world changed, being the protagonist in the first person of some of the political events that transformed history.

The style developed under the reign of Emperor Napoleon III, both in the Decorative Arts, furniture and in the ornamentation of spaces, does not obey a design concept created specifically for the Second Empire, it is a recovery of different styles generated in France in previous centuries. It is not therefore an aesthetic born parallel to the Empire of Napoleon and Eugenia; is a compilation of the great French styles that in the past managed to create strong decorative trends both in France and in European courts.

A few days after hearing the news about the fire that in 1903 devastated the old recreational village that Empress Eugenia owned in Biarritz, her sadness at the disappearance of what was one of the most emblematic buildings of her reign. As she herself indicated, prior to the fire in the town of Biarritz, the palaces of the Tuileries and Saint-Cloud had succumbed to the flames - despite the fact that two such significant palaces of the reign of the last Bonaparte as those of Fontainebleau and Compiègne remain intact to this day. The empress of a third missing building was forgotten, the one known as the hôtel d ’Albe -Hotel de Alba in Spanish-, acquired by herself with the intention of using it for her family's stays in the French capital.