Background
Charles de Morny was born on September 15, 1811, at Saint-Maurice, Switzerland, the extra-marital son of Hortense de Beauharnais and Charles Joseph, Comte de Flahaut.
Charles de Morny was born on September 15, 1811, at Saint-Maurice, Switzerland, the extra-marital son of Hortense de Beauharnais and Charles Joseph, Comte de Flahaut.
Morny was educated by his grandmother. Then, after a brilliant school and college career the future duke de Morny received a commission in the army, and the next year he entered the staff college.
He began his career as a lieutenant in the French Army, serving mainly in Africa (1832–1836), but neither his interests nor his ambitions were military. Above all addicted to social pleasures, he resigned his commission and devoted himself to Parisian society and to making a fortune by speculation and by manufacturing beet sugar. He was elected to represent Clermont-Ferrand in the Chamber of Deputies in 1842 and again in 1846 but did not reach the first rank in politics until his half brother, Louis-Napoléon, was elected president of the republic in 1848. He was elected deputy for Puy-de-Dôme in 1849.
Becoming minister of the interior on the day of Louis-Napoléon’s coup, Morny organized the plebiscite that made Louis-Napoléon dictator. Soon resigning his ministry, he served briefly as ambassador to Russia (1856) and then became president of the legislature. In this office he abandoned his formerly reactionary role and tried to persuade Napoleon III to give the country more liberty. He saw that Napoleon’s dictatorial power could not last and urged him to yield it voluntarily rather than be compelled to do so. In any case, in spite of occasional dissensions, Morny’s influence with the emperor remained very great, and he was created a duke in 1862. His health, however, undermined by a ceaseless round of political and financial business, of fashionable life and dissipation, was giving way and was further injured by indulgence in quack medicines. The emperor and the empress visited him just before his death on March 10, 1865, in Paris.
Charles Auguste Louis Joseph de Morny was a political and social leader during the Second Empire who played an important part in the coup d’état of December 12, 1851, which eventually led to the establishment of Charles Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, Morny’s half brother, as Emperor Napoleon III.
During his life, Charles de Morny received numerous awards, including the Order of St. Andrew (Russia), the Legion of Honour (France), the Order of Charles III (Spain), the Order of Leopold (Belgium) and the Order of the Medjidie (Ottoman Empire).
The Prix Morny, a Group 1 flat horse race in France, is named in his honour.
On January 7, 1857, Charles de Morny married Sophie Troubetskoy, the couple had four children.
Auguste-Charles-Joseph de Flahaut de La Billarderie, comte de Flahaut, was a French general and statesman.
Hortense Eugénie Cécile Bonaparte, Queen consort of Holland, was the stepdaughter of Emperor Napoléon I, being the daughter of his first wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais.
Napoleon III, born Charles Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, was the first Head of State of France to hold the title of President, the first elected by a direct popular vote, and the youngest until the election of Emmanuel Macron in 2017.
Sofia Sergeyevna Trubetskaya was a Russian princess.
Sophie Mathilde (Missy) de Morny was a French noblewoman and artist.
