Empress Eugénie’s taste for adornment connected fashion, empire, and extinction. The empress and her stolen accessories reveal how beauty and theft shaped imperial identity.
Not the gutter again
Hang It in the Louvre?
On 19 October 2025, thieves carried out a swift daylight robbery at the Louvre Museum in Paris, stealing several jewels once owned by Empress Eugénie de Montijo (1826–1920), the last Empress of France and wife of Napoleon III.
Among the targeted pieces were her pearl tiara and diamond parure, part of the French Crown Jewels long displayed as symbols of imperial glamour. The thieves tried to take her diamond crown but dropped it during their escape, and it was later found damaged in a gutter outside the museum.
The image recalled her husband’s uncle Napoleon I, who famously proclaimed that he had found the crown of France in the gutter before placing it on his own head.
The Bird Accessory That Wore Her Name
Long before her jewels drew thieves to the Louvre, Eugénie had already inspired another kind of glittering theft.
In 1856, the British ornithologist John Gould named a South American hummingbird Eugenia imperatrix in her honor, fixing her name forever in the language of natural history. That small act of flattery joined empire, taxonomy, and fashion at a time when the borders between science and spectacle were dissolving.
Eugénie, a Spanish noblewoman turned French Empress, followed in the footsteps of Marie Antoinette, another foreign queen whose taste for feathers once ruled Paris. Satirical magazines soon crowned her the inventor of the crinoline, but she wore the title with poise.
In 1859, while serving as regent during the Sardinian War, she appeared in public wearing a lilac bonnet adorned with a hummingbird—the very species that bore her name.
As curator Edwina Ehrman explains in the Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition Fashioned from Nature, that single appearance became a fashion legend and helped ignite the craze for trimming hats, shoes, and gowns with birds—hummingbirds, tanagers, swallows, even robins.
Gould’s scientific tribute and Eugénie’s imperial style became twin gestures in a shared language of beauty and possession. What began as imperial elegance soon turned into the so-called murderous millinery fad that lasted well into the First World War and decimated bird populations worldwide.
Throughout the 1890s, this obsession with feathers sparked the first conservationist movements in Europe and the United States.
The Crown of Empress Eugénie, 1855, gold, diamonds, and emeralds, topped with imperial eagles. The same diadem was attempted to be stolen from the Louvre in 2025. Musée du Louvre, Department of Decorative Arts. Public domain.
The Death and Birth of Design
1859 changed everything. In Paris, Charles Frederick Worth, newly called to the court by Empress Eugénie, opened his couture house and transformed dressmaking from craft to art.
In London, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, overturning centuries of belief about nature’s order. Evolution and haute couture emerged together as new systems of creation.
Their worlds were not as separate as they seemed. Gould, the same ornithologist who had dedicated Eugenia imperatrix to the Empress, had earlier examined Darwin’s Galápagos finches, confirming that they represented distinct species and providing crucial evidence for the theory of natural selection.
Without Gould’s analysis, Darwin’s insight might have remained an observation rather than a revolution.
While Darwin mapped the evolution of species, Worth mapped the evolution of silhouette. Both men revealed that beauty—whether in feathers or fabric—was a question of adaptation and display.
Eugénie stood at the intersection: an Empress whose wardrobe evolved like a living taxonomy of taste—each gown a mutation of identity, each portrait an experiment in survival through style.
The Empress’s New Clothes
Art historian Thérèse Dolan, in her essay The Empress’s New Clothes: Fashion and Politics in Second Empire France (Woman’s Art Journal, 1994), argued that Eugénie’s fashion was never frivolous.
It was a form of political performance designed to stabilize Napoleon III’s fragile regime through the spectacle of elegance. Her portraits, photographs, and state gowns were instruments of power, linking her to Joséphine and Marie Antoinette, wrapping the Second Empire in a fabric of continuity.
The corset and the crinoline, Dolan reminds us, were not simply garments but symbols of control, order, and visibility. The caricatures that mocked her excess revealed the unease of a society confronting a woman who ruled through appearance.
Eugénie understood the politics of vision: to govern was to be seen.
The Empress and her stolen accessories? Echoes from the Gutter
Today, with her crown once again recovered from a gutter, the circle seems to close. The heavy gold diadem, set with diamonds and emeralds and crowned by soaring imperial eagles, lay broken beside the museum that had guarded it.
The Empress who turned living nature into adornment and image into rule returns as both subject and symbol. Her jewels, her feathers, her birds—reminders of how beauty was borrowed, and how the world once glittered with what it took.
Eugénie was part of a system that prized splendor above survival, and her legacy reminds us that beauty and loss often share the same mirror. In the end, every empire loses its shine, and every stolen light finds its way back to the dust. The empress and her stolen accessories are emblematic for fashion history and its exploitation of natural resources.
Empress Eugénie de Montijo, 1854, by Franz Xaver Winterhalter. The Empress stands beside the crown later attempted to be stolen from the Louvre in 2025. As was tradition, the painting depicted the crown before it was actually crafted. Château de Compiègne, France. Public domain.
Further Reading
- Thérèse Dolan, “The Empress’s New Clothes: Fashion and Politics in Second Empire France.” Woman’s Art Journal 15, no. 1 (1994): 22–28.
- Edwina Ehrman and Emma Watson, Fashioned from Nature. Exhibition catalogue, Victoria and Albert Museum, 2018.
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