The love connection between Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and his wife Joséphine de Beauharnais has been lauded as a love romance for the ages, yet it was far from flawless. While the French leader’s numerous letters to Joséphine are filled with passionate confessions of infatuation, their love affair was damaged by recurrent adultery, and the marriage ended in divorce.
Joséphine grew up on the plantation in the French Caribbean colony of Martinique, her original name being Marie-Josèphe-Rose Tascher de La Pagerie (Napoleon gave her the moniker Joséphine based on her middle name). Her family married her off when she was in her teens to a small French nobleman, Alexandre de Beauharnais, a philanderer whose repeated affairs led to the couple’s court-ordered separation. Alexandre achieved political success, becoming President of the National Constituent Assembly, but he was guillotined in 1794 as a result of the state-sanctioned brutality of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. Joséphine, who had also been imprisoned, narrowly avoided being guillotined thanks to his timely fall.
Joséphine, a 32-year-old widowed mother of two, was released from Carmes Prison with no access to her family’s cash and a set of rotten teeth. She sought to ensure her future, so she swiftly arranged for loans from various sources to set up shop on the rue Chantereine, where, as French historian Frédéric Masson writes in Napoleon et les femmes, “she hoped for some kind of miracle to rescue her from her state.”
Her persistent effort to establish herself in the new post-revolutionary French society was plainly successful: She became the lover of Napoleon’s powerful tutor Paul Barras, a member of the nation’s five-person governing alliance known as the Directoire, after a series of romances with a number of significant political players. Barras, on the other hand, had become tired of his mistress by 1795 and gleefully introduced her to the ambitious young soldier at a society event he hosted. Barras had no idea that four years later, that soldier would rise to power in a bloodless coup against the Directoire, and that he would crown himself Emperor five years later.
Napoleon Sent Besotted Letters to Joséphine
In the words of Adam Zamoyski, author of Napoleon: A Life, Joséphine did not quickly accept Napoleon as a husband, supposedly calling him a “puss in boots” and sniffing at his lower-class “family of beggars.” But he showered her with gifts and won her children over with his levity. In March 1796, barely months after their first meeting, the two married. Napoleon scandalized his family by marrying a childless widow, but he was smitten. Despite the fact that he had to leave his new bride two days after the wedding to lead a French army into Italy, he continued to write to her with passionate declarations of love:
“Every moment distances me from you, my beloved, and every moment I have less energy to exist so far apart.” “You are the constant focus of my attention.”
Notably, Joséphine appears to have sent her husband far fewer letters. And those that do exist have a far more subdued tone. “I am not satisfied with your last letter; it is as cold as friendship,” Napoleon said in response to one. By that time, Joséphine appears to have married the dashing young Hippolyte Charles, a Hussar lieutenant and aide-de-camp to Bonaparte’s brother-in-law, General Charles Leclerc. By June, Joséphine had rejoined Napoleon in Italy, but she was accompanied by her 23-year-old boyfriend.
Napoleon became suspicious after visiting her Milan home in November 1796 and finding it unoccupied. ‘I don’t love you anymore; on the contrary, I loathe you,’ he writes in a single letter. You’re a disgusting, mean, beastly slacker. You never write to me; you don’t love your husband… I expect to be holding you in my arms soon, and then I’ll cover you with a million steamy kisses as hot as the equator.”
Both Napoleon and Joséphine had relationships
Napoleon became enraged when he learned of the incident in March 1798, but Joséphine patched things over. Nonetheless, she pursued the affair, and Napoleon learned about it again during his Egypt expedition in July of that year. He wrote to his brother about divorce, but it was discovered and distributed by London newspapers, much to the pleasure of the British. “Yes, my Hippolyte, my life is a constant torment!” she wrote to her beloved. Only you can make me happy again. Tell me you love me, that you only love me!” However, by this time, Napoleon had taken a sweetheart, Pauline Fourès, the wife of one of his army captains.
Napoleon returned to France in October 1799, having conquered Egypt. He was given limitless powers to lead the government as First Consul after assisting in the toppling of the Directoire. After vowing to terminate her affair with Charles, Joséphine persuaded her husband to call off the divorce. Their relationship never recovered after that, and he began to flaunt his lovers.
Despite the other ladies, Joséphine appears to have retained control of his heart. “My mistresses do not engage my feelings in the least… “Power is my mistress,” he wrote in 1804, the same year the couple was proclaimed Emperor and Empress of France. However, just before the coronation, Joséphine catches Napoleon in the bedroom of her lady-in-waiting Elisabeth de Vaudey, and the squabbles resume. Napoleon threatened divorce once more, this time because Joséphine had not produced an heir.
With Devotion, Divorce
The failure to produce an heir remained a source of contention in their marriage, and when Napoleon’s lover Eléonore Danielle gave birth to his child in 1806, it was evident that the problem lay with the 43-year-old Joséphine. When Napoleon’s nephew and declared successor, Napoléon Charles Bonaparte, died at the age of four in 1807, Napoleon began compiling a list of prospective European princesses. His marriage to Joséphine was annulled, but during the divorce ceremony on 15 December 1809, the couple read declarations of love to each other, proving their mutual love. Napoleon went on to say, “Far from ever finding cause for complaint, I can to the contrary only congratulate myself on the devotion and tenderness of my beloved wife.”
On 11 March 1810, Napoleon married Marie-Louise of Austria by proxy, followed by a church ceremony a few weeks later. She gave birth to Napoleon II, the long-awaited heir, almost exactly one year later.
Joséphine lived near Paris at the Château de Malmaison and maintained close relations with her ex-husband. He learned of her death from illness in May 1814, while in his first exile on Elba. When he died in exile on St. Helena, he is said to have said, “France, the army, head of the army, Joséphine.” Despite their numerous relationships, heated disagreements, and public divorce, Napoleon and Joséphine’s love appears to have endured.
