The Bust of Empress Eugénie is a copy of the work sculpted in 1860 by Georges Diebolt, who also produced the stone Zouave on the Pont de l’Alma in Paris. The bust of Napoleon III’s wife was officially unveiled on 9 October 2022 by the Sovereign Prince in the presence of His Imperial Highness ...
The Bust of Empress Eugénie is a copy of the work sculpted in 1860 by Georges Diebolt, who also produced the stone Zouave on the Pont de l’Alma in Paris. The bust of Napoleon III’s wife was officially unveiled on 9 October 2022 by the Sovereign Prince in the presence of His Imperial Highness Prince Jean-Christophe Napoléon, the current head of the Bonaparte family, and his wife Princess Olympia von Arco-Zinneberg. The unveiling was held on a double anniversary: the centenary of the death of Napoleon III’s wife (1920) and that of Prince Albert I (1922), to whom she was close. The location of the bust, in the gardens above Fort Antoine, was selected so that Empress Eugénie could look out towards Cap Martin and Villa Cyrnos, where she liked to spend her time when visiting the French Riviera.
Georges Diebolt was a French sculptor born on 6 May 1816 in the Côte d’Or department. Son of a cabinetmaker, he trained at the École des Beaux-Arts under Jules Ramey and Augustin Dumont. He won the Premier Prix de Rome for sculpture in 1841, for his bas-relief, The Death of Demosthenes. He then spent time at the Villa Medici in Rome, before going on to work in Paris for the former Hôtel de Ville and the Saint-Jacques Tower. Georges Diebolt contributed to the decoration of the accommodations at the Louvre Palace, officially unveiled by Napoleon III in 1857, and received numerous public commissions to create monumental pieces during the Second Empire. He died on 7 November 1861 in Paris, where his body was buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery.
