‘A little corner of England which is for ever France, irreclaimably French.’ That is how the Catholic priest Monsignor Ronald Knox described the Abbaye Saint-Michel (St Michael’s Abbey) in Farnborough, Hampshire.
It was founded in 1881 by the Empress Eugénie, widow of the Emperor Napoleon III. When they were forced to leave France following the fall of the Second French Empire in 1870, the couple, along with their son Louis-Napoleon, the Prince Imperial, settled in Chislehurst, Kent. The Emperor died there in 1873 and in 1879 Louis was killed fighting for the British in the Anglo-Zulu War, leaving Eugénie bereft. She moved to Farnborough, bought a large house (Farnborough Hill, constructed for the publisher Thomas Longman and now a girls’ school) and built the Abbaye Saint-Michel in the grounds to serve as a monastery and Imperial Mausoleum for her husband and son and, eventually, for herself.
