Requiem Mass for Emperor Napoleon III and Empress Eugenie. Farnborough Abbey, Hampshire, England.
22 August 2019.
Requiem pour Napoleon III et L’Imperatrice Eugenie.
Available on YouTube
This Article is taken from, and can be read in full at,
By: GREGORY DIPIPPO.
The Parisian Church of Saint Eugène, home of the Schola Sainte-Cécile, is dedicated to a 7th-Century A.D. Bishop of the Spanish City of Toledo, called “Eugenius”. This Dedication was also made in honour of the Empress Eugénie, the Spanish
wife of the last French Emperor, Napoleon III, during
whose Reign the Church was built.
Following the overthrow of the French Monarchy, in September 1870, the Imperial Family lived in exile in Chislehurst, England. Napoleon III died in early 1873;
his heir, Louis-Napoléon, the couple’s only child,
was killed in South Africa in 1879 while serving
with The British Army during the Anglo-Zulu War.
Two years later, Eugénie founded the Abbey of Farnborough, partly to serve as a Mausoleum for her husband and son; she was buried there when she died in 1920, at the age of ninety-four. The Crypt, where their mortal remains repose, is similar in design to the Royal Crypt of the Abbey of Saint Denis, just outside Paris, where Napoleon III had intended to be buried.
During the Schola’s Pilgrimage to England,
we visited Farnborough, and the Schola sang a
Requiem Mass for the members of the Imperial Family
and Founders of their Home Parish.
The Mass was Celebrated by Abbot Cuthbert Brogan,
in the Pontifical Rite Proper to Abbots, i.e., from the Sedilia, rather than a Faldstool.
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